Unlock Creative Results Using the SPARK Method

Brands create constraints.

They determine what you can do. And what you cannot do.

When you stray from the constraints, you go off-brand. And when you go off-brand, you risk confusing the customer. You conflict with what the customer thinks about you.

You lose your difference.

And confusion doesn’t sell.

Constraints aren’t only crucial for being consistent. They help creativity. They don’t hinder it.

Without constraints, your mind gets overwhelmed. It retreats to familiar territory: what you’ve done before.

Rather than open up possibilities, a lack of constraints reduces you to sameness.

How Creativity Works

When people think about creativity, they typically think of it in terms of three Ps:

• Person

• Problem

• Product.

A person solves a problem in a new way and creates a new product.

The problem with thinking about creativity this way is that it ignores the fourth and most important P: the Process.

Ignoring the process places all of the value on the product. It causes organizations to reward the product instead of the process.

This is problematic.

It makes people focus on finding a solution instead of fully exploring the problem. And it attempts to reward a one-time outcome instead of a repeatable behavior.

Rewarding an outcome — something that isn’t repeatable — doesn’t influence behavior. It doesn’t make creative results more likely to occur in the future.

Reward only works when it’s applied to a repeatable behavior — the creative process — that produces the type of results you’re looking for.

But to reward the process, you can’t have a creative free-for-all every time people come together.

You need a repeatable method.

The SPARK Method for Creativity

I developed the SPARK Method based on proven creativity research and my 20 years of experience helping companies build constantly evolving brands to stay relevant to their customers.

The SPARK Method is a 5-step process for consistently delivering creative results.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Scope

Scope is where you set the constraints.

It’s a mix of research, insights, and the brand.

It’s the background information and the guidelines you use to solve the problem.

Scope says these are the conditions under which a solution will work.

Without these constraints, truly creative solutions are unlikely to arise as idea generation in the next phase will tend towards either of two opposing directions:

• The Tried and True: This tendency results from being overwhelmed: if you can do anything, where do you start? Under these circumstances, people focus on what’s worked in the past and don’t produce anything new.¹

• The Useless: This tendency is that people try anything. In this case, people produce original thinking instead of creative thinking. Creative thinking has utility — it produces a result — whereas original thinking produces unique ideas that lack utility (e.g., 5+5=76).²

Creative thinking lies between these two types of thinking. It requires using the Scope process to define the problem, lay out all relevant information, and set the constraints.

Produce

Given the scope, now it’s time to produce ideas.

But it’s critical to stick to only producing ideas.

This is the most challenging phase.

You have to resist your natural temptation to jump to evaluation.

Idea generation and idea evaluation are different mindsets.

Switching constantly between them taxes your mind and hinders your ability to generate your best work.

Start by solely generating ideas. Give yourself a time limit and try to create as many ideas as possible (100 per hour is a good number). The creativity coach Tom Monahan calls this 100 mph thinking.³

It doesn’t matter how crazy the ideas are. Write everything down. Crazy ideas may produce practical ones.

Only after you have finished listing all of the ideas should you begin to evaluate them.

Assess

We often don’t consider evaluation part of the creative process (even though people tend to do it when trying to generate ideas).

Instead, we think of the creative solution as something that manifests itself fully formed.

But that isn’t the case: you must evaluate ideas from the Produce phase — apply logic — to find the best idea.

In addition to evaluating the best solution from the pool of ideas, you must also determine its doability.⁴

For a solution to be creative, it has to both solve the problem in a new way and be doable for an organization.

If it isn’t doable or you can’t execute it, the solution has no value and it isn’t creative. It’s just an original idea: something new that’s useless.

In the Assess phase, you must ask: Will it work? Can we do it? And do we want to do it?

Many people skip the last question because they ignore the social aspect of creative problem-solving. Even if a solution is doable and an organization can do it, it doesn’t mean that the people who can do it actually want to do it — it has no buy-in.

And, if there’s no buy-in, it won’t get done, and it lacks efficacy.

Review

Reviewing the scope is almost always left out.

We tend to assume that because we started with insights, we stuck to those insights. But that doesn’t naturally happen.

During the Produce phase, ideas one person says should trigger you to think of more ideas. And it’s possible if this happens enough that you’ve taken a detour that results in something you’re excited about that doesn’t take into account all of the relevant information in the scope.

Take time to match your ideas against the scope.

The most valuable thing you can do here is ask how it will resonate with the target customers. Take time to take their point of view.

If the customer isn’t the final check in the process, you risk creating something you love, not that your customers love.

Kickstart

Now is the time to start bringing the idea to life.

Define the next steps. And assign specific roles.

If you don’t assign roles and responsibilities, people don’t know how to get to action.

Don’t leave it to figure out later. It rarely happens.

Finish the process with clear steps to get moving.

Onward

Anyone in your organization can be creative if they apply this method:

• Scope: Define the playing field.

• Produce: Generate ideas without evaluation.

• Assess: Evaluate the ideas.

• Review: Check the ideas against the scope.

• Kickstart: Create a plan to bring the idea to life.

If you want to create a company where creativity is a driving force, you must reward this creative process — the behavior — not the outcome.

Implementing the SPARK Method gives you a repeatable process to harness your organization’s creativity so you can wow your customers, become their preferred choice, and win market share.

P.S. Need help implementing the SPARK Method in your organization?

Just reply to this email, and I’ll help you get started,

Notes

1. Patricia D. Stokes, Creativity from Constraints, 2005.

2. Sarnoff A. Mednick, “The Associative Basis of the Creative Process,” Psychological Review, 1962.

3. Tom Monahan, The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy, 2002.

4. Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought, 1926.